


Learn the Rules

by Arilsama



Series: Not a Hero (but i will live anyway) [2]
Category: Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blood Magic, Discussion of Abortion, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Language, F/M, Family Reunions, Fantastic Racism, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kirkwall (Dragon Age), Male-Female Friendship, Mild Language, On the Run, Possibly Unrequited Love, References to Illness, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 00:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13224678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arilsama/pseuds/Arilsama
Summary: "Magic can’t be made safe and it can’t be destroyed. Fear makes men more dangerous than magic ever could."Merrill (Dragon Age 2)





	1. (so you can live with them)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amell betrays Jowan and Alim, living in regret of her actions, until the Circle breaks and she goes too far. As the Butcher of the Tower, redemption is her only option.
> 
> -  
> Solona Amell knows only the Circle. She gives everything to save it

  Solona feels the eyes. She always feels them, now-a-days, the eyes of her fellow Magi in rage, the eyes of the Templar with righteous respect.

  Here, the Templars think, is a Mage that understands the sinfulness of her own existence.

  Here, the Magi think, is a whore who sold out her brothers.

  Her life is a study in contrasts.

  On one side, Enchanter Amell has already been asked to teach a (useless) class on magic to apprentices and is formally apprenticed to the First Enchanter with the bright future that entails. On the other, only loyalists will speak to her, her room is more often mysteriously vandalized than not, and the whispers about her are almost as vitriolic as the ones about Greagoir.

  Her life is a balance that crumbles ever more the longer it goes on until she wonders why she lives at all.

* * *

  Peace does not last forever. She wakes to the smashing of her door, and it takes her six seconds too long to grab her staff.

  The rage demon claws down her back, thick, searing lines that burn like they were laced with venom. She's shaking when she summons ice. It becomes a rhythm. Attack, attack, jump, attack, and she's so stuck in it that she continues once it's dead, until she drops to the floor, mana drained, bleeding sluggishly. Dead, dead, dead. She's never seen anything dead before.

  She makes a makeshift bandage. She's no healer. That was Alim. Before he turned out to be a demon, though, the Circle still doesn't know that. She wonders if this is him, if she owes the bodies of her fellows to her mercy. She hopes not.

  The smell of death brings the next demon, and she has to run. She has no mana. Her feet, barely sheathed in the ridiculous slippers that the Circle provides, are coated in the blood of the dead and when she comes to a stop, she discards them. Too much noise.

* * *

 

  She finds a small cart of Lyrium potions. She knows the risk. She also knows that without mana she will die.

* * *

   She needs to go up. If nothing else, Irving's office is upstairs, and if anyone knows anything, it will be him. It is easier said than done. More Lyrium is what she needs. 

  Her most common enemy are her fellow mages. No, they are abominations, but they share the face of their former owners and sometimes when they sneer- she isn't sure if they are abominations. Maybe they just want to kill her, traitor to them. Traitor to everyone.

  Irving's office is deserted. The demon in it doesn't count. Another dose of Lyrium burns through her, and she thinks she hears singing. Up, up, up. She'll be safe if she gets high enough.

  Ser Cullen is just as pretty as she remembers, even covered in the blood of his tormentor. Just as dangerous, as well, she remembers when the Silence knocks the breath out of her, and she shakes with the shock and the fear. No mana means death. He moves closer and his eyes are wild. Dangerous.

  She asks him to stop. Screams, eventually. He doesn't, except when he does, and then he comes back and back and she... She stops trying.

* * *

  Solona can't bring herself to kill him, but she's not quite sure he will wake up with a bruise that size. She moves slowly.

  Everything hurts, maybe it always did. She hopes this is a dream, a nightmare. She just wants to wake up.

  Uldred laughs at her and there is a flash of light and then- nothing.

* * *

   She wakes up to a new world. To the fact that Warden Alistair, now King Alistair, freed the Circle only to find everyone but Uldred, Cullen, Wynne, and her dead and swiftly fixed the previous problem but not the latter.

  She was in a coma due to Lyrium overdose. During that time, she was appointed First Enchanter of an almost entirely empty Circle, by the vote of a vanished Wynne, and then, as she suffered through the head splitting headaches of Lyrium withdrawal, it fills back up with the excess from other Circles.

  Three weeks after the Broken Circle, she finally walks among her fellow Magi. They watch her fearfully, even the apprentices. It would break anyone else.

  But Solona knows her sins now, and knows the only way to atone for them is to be the best First Enchanter she can be or die trying. She teaches her students about demons, about the dangers of them, about lyrium and the problems with it, and most all, she teaches them that they're worth something. The last lesson is one imparted only in whispered talks, in quiet conversation, carefully.

* * *

   Three months is how long it takes her to realise she's pregnant. For a whole week, she considers the offer of removal that the healer made.

  Maybe she's been in the Chantry too long, but the thought is painful. She's never had any family. 

* * *

   Knight-Commander Greagoir and her speak of the subject quietly. He knows about Cullen, had demanded a reason when the man transferred to Kirkwall, and while unsympathetic to magi, he has children of his own, secret to all but Irving and his journal.

  Daylen Rutherford is born a short five months later, though no records would indicate it. He vanishes in the night with a letter.

  Solona lives for the secret letters from him to her when he learns his letters, even if they are filled with Chantry verses and the knowledge that magi are dangerous. She is relieved when the letters never come from another tower, saddened but understanding when he joins the Templars. He writes to her about Carver and a beautiful mage named Bethany in the Circle, and eventually, eventually, he sends her a letter from a man named Hawke, born to a woman named Leandra Amell. 

  She raises her apprentices like she would raise Daylen, raises them with the knowledge that somewhere out there is a set of parents who worry like she does. Sometimes she sees herself in them, sometimes she sees Alim and finds herself trying extra hard. She never gains her own forgiveness. She never expects to. 

  The Butcher of the Tower lives. Some days she's glad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The timeline on Amell is somewhat hand-wavey, apologies for that. I feel like dad!Cullen would be the best Cullen, y'know, and I have so many feelings about what a redemption arc it would be. Bioware really missed out on kind of just telling us that Cullen was reformed without showing the process of him realising how much he had messed up. I'm not much of a Cullen-romance (even though I have accidentally romanced him), but by gosh did they miss an opportunity with that dude.
> 
> Edit: (19/03) Content.


	2. (so you can break them well)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Surana did not expect life outside the Circle to be easy, but he certainly didn't expect it to be so hard. In which Alim is a determined idiot, runs into a blood mage and makes friends, somehow ends up in Kirkwall, and find his family. It would be more heartwarming if everything wasn't going wrong.  
> -
> 
> Alim Surana escapes from the Circle, finds his courage, questions his sanity, and eventually gets a happy ending.

Somehow, he manages to get away from the Tower. Now, the memory is a blur of ice cold water, the sickness that followed, sickness that he couldn't solve with a quick potion, and the bone deep regret of leaving stopped only by the fear of how angry, how much trouble he would be in if he returned.

  An inn offers him a free room, he accepts only to wake to the rattle of Templar armor and the burning of a silence that doesn't quite stop him from jumping out the window to the street. Something snaps, but he keeps stumbling even through tears of pain. He can't stop and no one can be trusted.

  The limp never goes away.

* * *

 

  His goal for escaping the Circle, initially, was much the same as any mage. Freedom, the great beyond. He'd thought of going north and seeking glory in Tevinter or maybe going for the relative freedom of Rivain. Then he read his records, rolling his eyes at the typical comments of rebellious and too curious, to see his parents listed.

  Father, Enchanter Darrian, deceased. Mother, Neria Surana, unknown. Apprentice Surana was brought to the attention of Templars by concerned citizens.

  Suddenly, he has entirely new reasons for an escape. Reasons worth fighting for.

* * *

 

  He begins his search among the city elves, that watch him with suspicious until he begins to adopt their slumped shoulders, fearful eyes. Denerim elves are rebelling and everyone is afraid of the elves. No one knows Neria Surana. Everyone knows the Butcher of the Tower, and how Solona Amell killed an entire tower and he thinks of familiar faces now gone. He tries to hate her.

  The Templars might not have his phylactery, but they make due with his scent, and more than once, he wakes in his barn hideouts to hear the snarling. He gets only a week of freedom for the pinnacle of the Blight, when all the Templars are in the Tower or in Denerim.

  The good news is that he doesn't have to worry about fitness. He can easily run for miles now.

* * *

 

  "Maybe she's one of those wild Dalish whores, ya ever thought of that, pretty boy." A city elf with a painted face and a forgettable name snarls at him after one too many questions. A light goes off.

* * *

 

  It isn't that simple, nothing is for an apostate, especially for an Elven apostate.

  Dalish bands are as elusive as they are obvious. Everyone, it seems, knows where they might be but never where they actually are. It turns into a massive game of hide and seek, except the other side isn't trying and everything in the forest wants to kill him or proves remarkably fast when he's hungry. His limp doesn't help.

  He kills his first animal, a rabbit, and throws up when he skins it, the acid burning his mouth and ruining the corpse. He goes hungry four days. The next time he gets a corpse he doesn't waste it.

* * *

 

  Eventually, he runs into someone in his quest. It is not the Dalish, he's not that lucky, it's in fact what he would later learn were the most universally hated duo in recent Dalish history.

  Merrill and Lyna Mahariel, though mostly the latter, try very hard to kill him. It takes him almost a whole hour of convincing them of his peaceful intentions before they finally settle down, and even then, Mahariel watches him like she would prefer to eat him than listen to him. Merrill, despite all the horror stories he'd hear later on, was perfectly civilized. If being almost ridiculously cheerful and friendly, insightful in that odd way most children are, and no concept of personal space crossed her over to friendly in his book, well, no one ever needs to know. She tells him about this neat trick that he can use to track the Dalish and how certain markings in the wood mean things and what to eat and what to not.

  He finally presents his query, have you met Neria Surana, and is immediately crushed when she says no. Then she pauses, tilts her head, and chirps that there is a Neria Lavellan, married to Mahanon Lavellan, newly made Keeper of the Lavellan Clan. A scandal, she confides, because Mahanon chose her against his previous Keeper's advice and some say that she might have been born a city elf. Where is the Lavellan clan, he asks, barely believing his luck.

  The Free Marches, she says, and then notes that Lyna and her are going there, too, and how nice it would be if he could join them. He thinks about refusing. Merrill is a little terrifying in a little too close way. Mahariel glares at him. He caves immediately.

* * *

  Everything goes wrong because of course it does, his luck has been far too good. First, Mahariel kills someone. A bandit, sure, but an actual person. Maybe he freaks out a bit, but the knocking him out is a gross overreaction. Until he realizes that it wasn't the creepy duo that knocked him out but slavers. The bandit, it turns out, is bait for Tevinter slavers looking for strong elves to send north.

  This is how he finds out about Merrill's 'little' blood magic habit. She blows the place sky high and Mahariel actually smiles at the desolation and he thinks he's going to pass out.

  He does.

  Fainting aside, the rest of their trip is in comparison almost mild. They sneak onto a smuggler's vessel that contains the sort of priceless artifacts that only rich people care about, and even manage to get out without any trouble.

  That should have been a sign.

* * *

 

  Two hours, he's signed himself and their group into indentured servitude in order to get into a city he truly doesn't care about so that he can leave it. He's pretty sure something's wrong with that.

  At least his partner is a killing machine, though he really doesn't want to think about how similiar to Solona Amell Hawke is. Hawke is friendly for a man that laughs when he kills, but he doesn't get close. Solona was very friendly as well, in fact, one of the most charismatic people he's ever met and look how that turned out.

* * *

 

  Merrill, Mahariel, and him part on remarkably good terms. He also now has an entire network of criminal connections and favors that he never wants to have to use and a strong stomach for murder. He heads to Lavellan winter lands.

  The Lavellans, he comes to understand, are the insanely cautious type. More times then not, he falls into traps and ends up entangled in ward magic. He has gone through worse, though. The only way to win is perseverance.

  "What do you want here, flat-ear?" A man with the markings of... June, he thinks, asks him with a bow ready to end him if it's the wrong answer.

  "Neria Surana. I have a message for her." The June-faced man sneers.

  "Sure you do. I-"

  "Stop it, Theron." A blond girl, no more than seven, eight years of age, snaps at him. She wears daggers at her waist, but is blank faced. "What do you want with my mother?"

  Mother, he hears. It is a terrible shock, a sibling. Magi don't have family, the Templars nail into their heads, but here, now, he knows that is a lie. Yet, something of him is in the litheness of her body and the lightness of her verdant eyes.

  "Because she is my mother as well. I am Alim Surana." He says. The words hit her like an arrow to the heart.

  "She- she never mentioned- I, we have to ask her. Theron," She half-asks him, eyes still on him. This time without disgust but interest.

  "Run along with the flat-ear, Ellana."

* * *

  Ellana goes in before him. There is a question in her sweet voice, silence. The tent bursts open.

  I am swept into a hug. I have not been hugged since Merrill, before Merrill, not in ten years. She, Neria, mother, moves back and he sees a familiar set of eyes.

  "You look just like Darrian. Oh, my Alim, I could not stop them. I tried." Her voice breaks. Their conversation has drawn eyes, but he is ignorant to them.

  "I got away." He reassures her.

  "You'll not leave. Not now." Mother says, firm. He smiles.

  "After all the trouble of finding you? Never."


End file.
